DLitt degree; and in 1999 she received the A.W. Reed Award for Contribution to New Zealand Literature from Booksellers New Zealand, an industry association in Wellington, New Zealand. After her death a biennial poetry prize was established in her name at the initiative of the Canterbury Poets Collective and the New Zealand Poetry Society, the Lauris Edmond Memorial Award for Poetry, the first prize having been awarded (posthumously) at the Christchurch Arts Festival to the late poet Bill Sewell in 2003. Her poetry, which continues to influence New Zealand writers, was not all about daffodils; she could speak with a committed voice, as is evidenced in the poem "Nuclear Bomb Test, Mururoa Atoll," which begins: I am water I am sand I am a cell in the trembling earth I am a shaken pebble on the hurt sea floor a young fish made ill by the predator poison coursing towards me across the ocean that was my friend... Although in life she stayed as far away as was possible from all forms of organised religion, in death her quotations do apparently find their way into various church settings in New Zealand, a proof – if one be needed – of their deep innate spirituality. Edmond died unexpectedly at her home in Wellington's Oriental Bay on the morning of 28 January 2000. A friend arriving for dinner that evening discovered her body. She was 75, the mother of six children, five of them daughters, one of whom (Rachel, the fourth child) committed suicide in 1975 (the event is dealt with, poetically, in Edmond's poem-sequence Wellington Letter). Her only son, Martin Edmond (b. 1952), is also a writer. The Times of London wrote in her obituary (9 February 2000; p. 23) that she acquired 'a sharp new consciousness of her nationality' through her absence from New Zealand after a year as the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Fellow in Menton in the South of France, ending in 1982. Works In Middle Air (1975) Waterfall The Pear Tree: Poems (1977) Wellington Letter: A Sequence of Poems (1980) Seven: Poems (1980) Salt from the North (1980) Catching It: Poems (1983) Selected Poems (1984) High Country Weather (1984) Seasons and Creatures (1986) Summer near the Arctic Circle (1988) Hot October (1989) Bonfires in the Rain (1991) Further reading Buck, Claire (ed.): Bloomsbury Guide to Women's Literature (1992). Ken Arvidson, 'Lauris Edmond (1924–2000)', New Zealand Books [a periodical